I believe, because of her splendid hair.
John Cummins' shout of homecoming had caught her with it undone, and
she greeted us with the dark and lustrous masses of it sweeping about
her shoulders and down to her hips. That is, she greeted Cummins, for
he had been gone for nearly a month. I busied myself with the canoe for
that first half minute or so.

Then it was that I received my introduction and for the first time
touched the hand of Melisse Cummins, the Florence Nightingale of
several thousand square miles of northern wilderness. I saw, then, that
what I had at first taken for our own hothouse variety of beauty was a
different thing entirely, a type that would have disappointed many
because of its strength and firmness. Her hair was a glory, brown and
soft. No woman could have criticized its loveliness. But the flush that
I had seen in her face, flower-like at a short distance, was a tan that
was almost a man's tan. Her eyes were of a deep blue and as clear as
the sky; but in them, too, there was a strength that was not altogether
feminine. There was strength in her face, strength in the poise of her
firm neck, strength in every movement of her limbs and body. When she
spoke, it was in a voice which, like her hair, was adorable. I had
never heard a sweeter voice, and her firm mouth was all at once not
only gentle and womanly, but almost girlishly pretty.

I could understand, now, why Melisse Cummins was the heroine of a
hundred true tales of the wilderness, and I could understand as well
why there was scarcely a cabin or an Indian hut in that ten thousand
square miles of wilderness in which she had not, at one time or
another, been spoken of as "L'ange Meleese." And yet, unlike that other
"angel" of flesh and blood, Florence Nightingale, the story of Melisse
Cummins and her work will live and die with her in that little cabin
two hundred miles straight north of civilization. No, that is wrong.
For the wilderness will remember. It will remember, as it has
remembered Father Duchene and the Missioner of Lac Bain and the heroic
days of the early voyageurs. A hundred "Meleeses" will bear her memory
in name--for all who speak her name call her "Meleese," and not Melisse.

The wilderness itself may never forget, as it has never forgotten
beautiful Jeanne D'Arcambal, who lived and died on the shore of the
great bay more than one hundred and sixty years ago. It will never
forget the great heart this woman has given to her